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Chaucer ought to be too well known to be included in this series. However, while most people know that he wrote The Canterbury Tales, his wider influence and significance are often overlooked.

Geoffrey Chaucer’s life is not easy to reconstruct. Even the decade of his birth has been disputed, although the earlier date of 1328 is now discredited. It is thought he was born around 1342/3, on the basis that he was said to be over forty in the famous Scrope vs Grosvenor case in October 1386.

Chaucer was born to a respectable merchant family. His father, John, was an important vintner, and his mother Agnes was also from a wealthy family and inherited several properties. John Chaucer was in attendance upon the King and Queen in 1338 when they went to Flanders, and may have been deputy to the King’s Butler. Thus, there is an early link to the royal family in the reign of Edward III.

Unfortunately, little else is known of Geoffrey’s early life other than his parentage, and the first documentary evidence comes from 1357. In that year, he was a page in the household of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, the third son of Edward III, after the Black Prince and John of Gaunt. This is known from the record of payments made by Lionel’s wife, Elizabeth, to Chaucer “for necessaries”, which also record his presence at the Garter Feast on 23rd April 1358, and other grand events.

The daily life of Chaucer at this point is not specifically known, but the duties of a page were to serve the food and wine and, at the end of dinner, kneel before his master with a bowl of water for him to wash his fingers. They attended to their master’s clothes as a valet would, and waited around endlessly in case their master wanted something. They also had to learn court etiquette, dancing, the needs of the horses and the hounds, so it was an education for preferment as much as a job.

Eventually, Chaucer was promoted to valet, where his duties, according to the slightly later household book of Edward IV, would have been “to make beddis, to beare or holde torches, to sett boardis, to apparel all chambers and such other services as the chamberlain or ushers of chamber commaunde or assign to attend the chamber, to watch the king by course, to goe in messages, et cetera”. It is reasonably likely that the tasks had not changed between the reigns of Edward III and IV, as Edward IV’s book was based on the household book of Edward II.

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On Friday, I had the great privilege of visiting the Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum with my mother. It is remarkable to see so old an object that has survived in such good condition.

Not that it is unchanged. The panel numbers were put in during the Napoleonic era, and the most famous arrow in history was added in the 1840s, even though there were apparently some stitch holes there already indicating something was in place before.

Information about the creation of the tapestry is essentially deduction, as it was not documented until 1476 when it first appeared in the inventory at Bayeux Cathedral. It is thought to have been made in Canterbury and is not in fact a tapestry, but an embroidery. It is believed to have been made by ladies, and its creators seemed to have been familiar with some manuscripts kept at St. Augustine’s Monastery. It is not known if the main figures portrayed looked like their pictures or whether, which is more probable, they were simply stylised images of power.

Nor is all the symbolism in the bottom panel fully understood. In the non-literate Middle Ages, symbolism was the commonplace way of transmitting knowledge, so every saint was depicted with a symbol, and the unlettered classes would have understood them easily. We do not have that good fortune.

Its size makes the tapestry of particular interest. It is seventy-five yards long, and that is without the conclusion – an unknown length at the end is missing – and its ability to tell a story is remarkable. It is an essay in history over two hundred and twenty-five feet, and it gives us an important insight into what has happened in the past, which fits with some of the constitutional essays I have written for Substack.

The tapestry tells a story of legitimacy that leads to success. It is in three parts, with the largest central panel dealing with the main narrative, while the top and bottom panels are decorated with symbolic figures. It is notable that in the panel showing the coronation of Harold, there is beneath it, in the lower panel, a creature identified by some as a griffin eating its own tail as a symbol of futility. By way of comparison, under Edward the Confessor there are two contented-looking birds. Edward is legitimate, Harold is not.

It is not entirely clear who ordered this work, but it is commonly linked to Odo of Bayeux, partly because he appears so prominently in some of the scenes, even in one of them as a Christ-like figure. He and his associates would have wanted to create an air of legitimacy around their new regime.

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The way our constitution operates in practice is inevitably more important than its theory.

The aim of a constitution is to provide good government, not as an end in itself. This makes the evidence given recently to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee by Darren Jones, who served Sir Keir Starmer as First Secretary to the Prime Minister, so important.

Select committees of the House of Commons vary in their quality. Some concentrate on grandstanding to little effect, some have so wide a remit that their search beam alights on a topic for a moment but then moves on, while some of the relatively unknown ones quietly get on with the detailed work of scrutinising, in a way that is genuinely informative and may lead to better government.

The rather dryly titled Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee is one of the latter, as it looks at how we are governed and watches the work of the Cabinet Office.

The Cabinet Office is the coordinating centre of government. It is the most important ministry after the Treasury, but far less well known. The Prime Minister is notionally the head of it, partly because of his role as Minister for the Civil Service, but it is run by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

It is the department in charge of the Constitution, a responsibility currently held by Hamish Falconer as Minister of State for Intergovernmental Relations and European Relations, and the depository of various tasks that no one else wants or that the Prime Minister does not know where else to place.

Unfortunately, it has to coordinate with no effective coordinating power. This is where Darren Jones’s evidence is so noteworthy. In his presentation to the Committee, he says, “Cross-departmental working is also just very hard. Constitutional norms and a tendency to protect the way the system works eventually stopped it being effective.”

He went on to say, “I would be told all the time that there were things I could not do because of the Constitution, and I would often reply with, ‘The Constitution is unwritten, so if I decide to do something, it changes; therefore, why can’t I do it?’” Not surprisingly, civil servants had no response to this, but still did not do what was asked of them.

This fits in with my own experience. When trying to get civil servants back into the office or to reduce their numbers, each department is separate, so no cross-government decision was made and some ministers were quite determined to protect their departments.

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Andy Burnham has managed to revive Labour’s poll rating and, after a successful Party Conference, Kemi Badenoch is doing something similar for the Conservatives. Reform has slipped from first to third, while the Greens and Lib Dems are both arguing about the continued survival of their current leaders. Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Ascalon, but could we be heading back towards two-party politics?

It is true that the poll ratings of the two parties combined is not yet consistently above 50%, when they used never to fall below 80%. Indeed, to continue the Biblical analogy, this may only be a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, but something may be happening.

On the Left, Burnham is taking ground that the Greens are vacating as they become an increasingly sour and unpleasant party. Burnham’s conference speech placed him firmly on the Left, much further left than Starmer, Blair or Brown, with calls for a tax on property rights as well as outright nationalisation. His defence of social security against national security may seem a dereliction of duty to many, but it appeals to his wing of politics.

Starmer’s lack of leadership qualities had allowed the left wing vote to fragment, but this was exaggerated at the general election, when Starmer was still quite popular, by tactical voting to defeat the Conservatives. Many people who voted for the Lib Dems in the south of England did so in the successful hope of removing Tories and of electing a Labour government.

After Starmer won and began to govern so poorly, Labour’s rating declined, with many of his former voters defecting to the Greens, which they thought was a gentle, tree-hugging party run by sensible, matronly people such as Caroline Lucas. This turned out to be an error.

The Greens are not a woolly, unworldly party of cave dwellers anymore. Instead, it has become a collective of Palestine activists who are routinely anti-Semitic and wish to see the state of Israel removed from the map. This is alienating all but the most fanatical voters, other than those who have not yet noticed what has happened.

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In 1996 I went to my first Tory Party conference and have been to most since. Many of them have faded from memory because of their ultimate insignificance, but all were thought to matter at the time.

Those final few months of the Major government saw, with hindsight, a delightfully old-fashioned conference, where the party faithful debated policy and crowded into the main hall. There was no admission of the impending disaster, even though it was obviously coming.

In 1997, we did not seem to realise we had lost, with speeches being made about what we were going to do, even though we were in opposition, so were not able to do anything. It was a gloomy occasion where few people turned up and the social events were empty. I was young enough to risk gate-crashing parties, and went to one with a friend which was hosted by the Party Chairman, Cecil Parkinson, whom I knew a little. We were greeted by his assistant with the words, “Remind me, are you journalists or members of the shadow cabinet?” But as we were the only ones there, we were welcome to stay and, indeed, both of us ultimately became cabinet ministers, so I suppose were retrospectively eligible.

2024 was similar to 1997, with a despondent mood that was reluctant to accept reality, although by then I was too old or self-important to try to crash drinks parties, and I missed the 2025 conference. This year, the mood seemed much better. Not the 2009 feeling, of a party about to take the reins of power, but of a sense of purpose and direction.

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It is also easy to argue that it is fairer to require a coalition of parties that make up 50% of the total population, that it has more democratic legitimacy than allowing single party rule. An outright majority could be seen to provide more legitimacy, a greater mandate than a simple plurality of votes.

This, so far, seems perfectly logical, and as if FPTP is an unfair system. But is that really true?

Inevitably, all voting systems involve some form of compromise. Even in Switzerland, where regular referendums are held, representative bodies take many routine decisions. It would not be feasible to have referendums on every issue that is voted on in Parliament; it would lead to anarchy.

The question is which system treats voters most reasonably and represents their desires most successfully. The aim is twofold. It is not just achieving perfect democracy, but also good government. The endless referendums posited above could not provide good government even if they were perfectly democratic. The democracy point depends upon the way in which the majority of voters views are represented in Parliament.

In the UK, the last election is held up as an absurdity within FPTP. But is that really so? Most voters wanted to get rid of the Conservatives, whose vote share fell precipitately. They wanted Sir Keir Starmer to be Prime Minister, and each constituency seemed to vote accordingly. In seats where Labour was best placed to win, it did, while in those areas where the Lib Dems were the challenger to the Tories, they won. Labour, Green and Lib Dem voters coalesced around the candidate most likely to defeat the Tories and succeeded in this across the country. Thus, although Labour only recorded a surprisingly small share of vote, this was at least in part because voters were using a known system to achieve the result they wanted. So 2024 was not as peculiar as it at first seems.

In an FPTP system, voters also have a better idea of what they are voting for. All parties are coalitions with a variety of views within them. The Tory and Labour Parties both have their left and right wings which need to be accommodated, but they come together to unite in a manifesto which is then presented to the country. As years go by, they may then be held accountable for whether or not they succeeded in delivering on their promises.

When coalitions are formed, which rarely happens with FPTP, voters do not know what they are getting until after the election. Voters had a taste of this in 2010 when the Lib Dems broke their promise on tuition fees. Many of their voters felt bitterly let down by this decision, but it is inevitable in a proportional system. Governments unlikely to achieve a majority issue manifestos as a wish list, not as serious promises. This makes it easier for them to abandon their commitments and is not good for trust in politics. Electors are, in a sense, cheated by proportional systems, because what they have voted for is decided after the election, not before.

Coalitions suffer from other problems, especially their susceptibility to extremes. The balance of power tends to be held by the most left or right wing party, which gives it a disproportionate share in the government.

It may be unfair that a party could win 8% of the vote and only get two seats, but equally it is unfair for a party that wins 8% of the vote to hold the balance of power to pursue its views, when 92% of the country did not want them to win or support their opinions. I should rather have a government that was opposed by 60% but had won a plurality of votes in charge, than one that pushed its extreme views into Whitehall with over 90% opposition.

All democratic systems require a balance, a nuance of imperfection. The alternative to extremists holding power is the German approach, where the two main parties form a coalition. This is defensible on the grounds that most voters usually support the two main parties, although that has been changing recently, and that the centre of gravity of them are not that far apart.

However, it can become, outside a national emergency, obscenely undemocratic. At the last German election, voters punished the two main parties, who both fell to their lowest vote share ever, yet the government essentially remained the same. Although rejected by voters, they remained in power. The left-wing chancellor was replaced by a right-wing one, but nothing really changed. This seems grotesquely offensive to the electors who had rejected their policies.

Yet in a proportional system, it is a possible outcome, especially if, as in Germany, the establishment parties decide that one of the smaller parties may never be admitted to the corridors of power. Proportional representation can give voters less say in their government as policy is decided after an election rather than before. Fringe candidates may hold the balance of power and old parties may try to stitch things up.

FPTP provides clarity and accountability. It rarely requires coalitions and gives a plurality of voters what they wanted, whereas PR gives no voter what he asked for.

Then there is the question of good government. This has been in short supply in recent years and, in truth, is rare in our island story, whether it has been governed by monarchs, aristocrats or democrats. Nonetheless, FPTP offers clarity and direction in a way a coalition cannot.

It also dilutes the power of the central parties. In a proportional system, candidates tend to be chosen centrally and have to be popular with the party leadership. In the constituency system we have, candidates are decided by local parties who have a degree of independence from the centre. This makes it possible to ensure that there is a greater variety of candidates, and a closer representation of local views than is possible with the list system so common under PR.

In a coalition it is much harder for unpopular decisions to be made, or to go against the general consensus, however bad or out of date that may be. Attlee, Thatcher and Blair would not have been able to govern as they did in coalition, and only Attlee would have managed an actual majority on a PR basis. The majorities that FPTP gives allows governments to make decisions and to get things done.

The question for those on the Right to answer if they support PR is, do you want the Greens or Nationalists holding the balance of power and determining the fate of the nation on a tiny share of the vote? For those on the Left, the risk is probably Restore or the DUP.

If the answer is no and you would prefer the country to be run by the more reasonable parties on a decent share of the vote, then all logic supports the continuation of FPTP. It gives the majority of people most of what they want most of the time, whilst PR cannot do this.

Perhaps not surprisingly, parties that are doing well tend to like FPTP and those that are declining flirt with PR. The Liberals opposed PR before the 1920s when they were serious, and Labour only wants it now when it is polling around 25%. Reform liked it when it had less than 10% of the vote, but now it believes itself to be a winner it has changed its tune.

PR is a loser’s formula. It is bad for democracy, government and politics.

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The Conservative Party is founded on the idea that individuals ought to have as much freedom as possible, and that the state may only legitimately intervene when it has to.

In the Victorian era there was widespread agreement about the concept of the ‘night watchman state’, but with the advent of socialism and Labour MPs in the 20th century, that idea has withered, if not entirely perished. Instead, the state has become the behemoth we now know it to be, free to intervene at any stage in people’s lives, apparently for their own good.

The provision of cradle to the grave welfare has reinforced this dependency, which was made even worse by covid. It is especially apparent in the bloated welfare system, which is making ‘being out of work’ a lifestyle choice rather than a necessity, with others picking up the bill.

This is not the leisure advocated by Aristotle, where men seek the higher things. It is an idleness of ineluctable sloth. It is, in fact, a misery for those who are caught in it. It is a web, more akin to the life of the lotus eaters, and it needs to be changed for their benefit as well as those of wider society.

In terms of the Tories’ belief in freedom of the individual, it is clearly reasonable not to pay benefits to people who live in idleness. The liberty is a negative one, not a positive one. The Conservatives do not believe that freedom from the state includes the liberty to do nothing and to get other people to fund it. Instead, it is the view that the state ought not to tell people how to use their own money, and that if they wish to live without work, they are free to do so as long as they can afford it.

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If you missed the earlier installments, you can find them here:

Part XIII: Private Members’ Bills

Part XII: Ping Pong and Royal Assent

Part XI: From the Committee Stage to the Third Read…

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All governments are only able to act because of the consent of those who are governed. This is true in Britain, America and even North Korea.

This is not to say that coercion does not lead to consent, but tyrannies fall when the population concludes that the enforced consent is no longer tolerable. Assad lost power in Syria because, even with all the tools of compulsion, his barbarism could not in the end continue to compel consent.

In a democracy, consent is given in another way. It is an acceptance that the majority, elected according to an established and time-honoured constitution, must be able to govern, and that this will sometimes have consequences for a minority. It has legitimacy from the ballot box, and is therefore entitled to override the rights of minorities because of the mandate it enjoys.

However, the mandate cannot be used arbitrarily and there are both legal and conventional constraints on power. One of the most important is that the minority must have the right to be heard and for its views to be considered.

It is in this context that what is happening in Piddington is so interesting because a community has, by a large majority, revoked its consent from the government of the nation at large. It feels that the importance of the imposition of illegal migrants, who will in total be about four times the number of inhabitants in the village, is disproportionate and unfair. Fundamentally, they think the Government is not behaving in a British way about its decision making and that they are not being heard.

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Danny Kruger, the former Conservative MP who defected to Reform last year, has referred to the Labour proposal to give more power to the Cabinet Secretary as a constitutional coup. It is certainly an attempt to change the structure of the system, and move away from Cabinet government.

In recent years it has become clear that the UK government does not function well. Decision making is sclerotic and the powers that are supposedly in the hands of ministers seem to have ossified.

There are various factors that have contributed to this, and some of them date back decades. The first major change was entry into the European Union and the concept of higher, directly effective, international law.

Until 1973, under the UK’s dualist system, international obligations could not trump domestic legislation. In this country, the Crown, via ministers, used the prerogative power to agree to international treaties, creating obligations on the government, but not on individuals. Ministers were bound to uphold these obligations in international forums, but they were ineffective unless brought into domestic law by or under an Act of Parliament. A minister could not change domestic law by an international agreement.

This changed in 1973, although its consequences were not clear until some years later. European law automatically overrode domestic law, and this changed the relationship between ministers and officials. A minister could now be told that a desired action was impermissible because it was against European law. Moreover, that law could not be changed by Parliament.

This moved power from the elected minister to the official, and it was inevitable that some officials would use this power at the margin to stop things that were not actually clearly against EU law, but were in a grey area. The cautious minister who was told it would be embarrassing to be in the courts could easily be persuaded not to follow a controversial policy.

This was an inadvertent consequence of EU membership, but the loss of power made politicians want to give away even more of their remaining authority. Thus the idea developed that more decisions ought to be given to ‘independent’ experts rather than left in the hands of grubby politicians. Quangos sprouted up to take decisions away from the elected, who would set policy but would not decide on detailed implementation. Many politicians liked this because they hoped to avoid the blame if anything went wrong.

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If you missed the earlier installments, you can find them here:

Part XII: Ping Pong and Royal Assent

Part XI: From the Committee Stage to the Third Reading in the House of Lords

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These words, written by St. Paul to the church in Corinth nearly 2,000 years ago, seem entirely apposite to the current political situation. Anyone sensible knows that either the trumpet needs retuning or we need a new trumpeter, as we must prepare for battle. Yet nothing is being done.

The army has cancelled live ammunition training for want of £30 million, an unimaginably trivial sum in terms of total government expenditure. It is like the nursery rhyme about losing the war all for the want of a horseshoe nail. The real defence budget is not the 2.6% boasted about by the government, but about two-thirds of that amount. Pensions paid out to retired soldiers are included in that figure. And as with so much of the government’s pensions payroll, it is done on a pay as you go system, so that no fund has been built up to pay them, as would be mandatory in the private sector.

The budget also includes the cost of GCHQ and of MI6, both of which are different forms of defence. Even worse, as I discovered as a Minister in the Cabinet Office, it includes useless duplicative committees within the very viscera of the administration. After all these deductions from the 2.6%, £30 million suddenly becomes an unaffordable cost in a nation whose economy is over £3 trillion and whose government spending is £1.3 trillion.

This leaves the realm essentially exposed. Earlier in the year, there was hope that this would be dealt with, as the then Defence Secretary resigned and was subsequently promoted to become Chancellor of the Exchequer. Unfortunately, John Healey has turned out to be a run-of-the-mill political opportunist, rather than the principled statesman he appeared to be in June.

No extra money has been found and the promises of increased expenditure stretch out into distant parliaments after at least two elections, when none of the people making the promises will still be in office. This is disastrous, as the threats are clear and come in battalions, not as single spies.

Russia is the biggest and most obvious. Its failure in Ukraine seems to be making it an even more unpredictable opponent, with a recent cyber-attack on a German airport showing its increased aggression and willingness to test the boundaries of NATO’s resolve. The same people who warned that Russia was about to attack Ukraine and were widely ignored are now sounding the alarm for further attacks. How could the United Kingdom respond?

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Thomas Fuller, in his History of the Worthies of England (1662), did not see any great virtue in St Dunstan. In a religiously intolerant age, Fuller merely noted his posts, Abbot of Glastonbury, Bishop of London and of Worcester, Archbishop of Canterbury, and “last for his promoting monkery reputed a saint”.

Fuller was seemingly not interested either in Dunstan’s success as a religious reformer or his influence as a secular adviser, even though he was preeminent in both areas in his comparatively long life, which included a golden age for England.

Dunstan’s earliest miracle preceded his birth, according to Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend. His mother was in church for Candlemas when all the candles went out, but hers relit miraculously and was used to relight everyone else’s, “wherefore all the people gave laud and thankings unto our Lord God for this great miracle”.

Dunstan’s father Heorstan was an important Somerset nobleman whose land shared a border with that of Glastonbury Abbey, which is where he sent Dunstan to be educated. He was linked to the Royal Court via a number of family relationships, but was too studious for his boisterous fellow nobles, and seems to have been bullied until he left for the calm of his kinsman, Ælfheah, Bishop of Winchester’s household.

The Bishop tried to encourage him in his vocation, hoping that he would become a monk, but Dunstan resisted until a serious illness persuaded him to change his mind. This led Dunstan back to Glastonbury, where he took religious life seriously. He built himself a cell, five feet by two and a half feet, for his oratory and also as a workshop. He became a skilled smith and is now the patron saint of blacksmiths and goldsmiths.

This was the site of his most famous miracle, when he caught hold of the devil with a pair of fire tongs. As the Golden Legend says, “never after the devil had lust to tempt him”.

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Standards of behaviour among politicians have been an increasingly fraught issue since the 1990s. Cash for questions, back to basics and the expenses scandal all seemed to indicate a degree of venality among Members of Parliament, who are supposed to be public servants.

This has led to a series of attempts to change the way Parliament investigates and responds to breaches of various codes. It is currently divided into two main parts, excluding expenses and privileges, both of which ultimately end up in the Chamber of the House.

Personal contact is governed by the Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme (ICGS). It covers bullying, harassment and sexual misconduct, and covers all pass holders in the Palace of Westminster. Most complaints to the ICGS, indeed the overwhelming majority, do not involve Members of Parliament themselves, but inevitably and rightly these are the ones that receive the greatest attention.

In this process, if someone makes a complaint, it is subject to an initial assessment, where people working for the ICGS will decide if there is enough evidence to go further. If there is, it passes to a full assessment, which is an investigation that interviews witnesses and reports to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, who will then decide whether the Member of Parliament is guilty and, if so, what level of sanction ought to be imposed.

The most serious sanctions are decided by an independent expert panel (IEP) , which may recommend a suspension or even expulsion from the House. The IEP also hears appeals from both the complainant and the respondent to any complaint. Unlike in the court system, the complainant has a right of appeal.

Breaches of the Members’ Code of Conduct, which covers declarations of interest and includes the Nolan Principles, are handled differently. It is this process that currently has Nigel Farage in its claws. In these cases, the Commissioner for Standards will initially investigate, and may then decide that there is no case to answer. This happened on a number of occasions to me when politically motivated complaints were made. The Commissioner may determine the issue by requiring rectification, which could involve an apology, while more serious cases may be referred to the Committee on Standards.

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One of the reasons that the Conservatives failed and were removed from office so resoundingly in 2024 is that we stopped arguing for our own beliefs and accepted many of the nostrums of the left.

Some of this was linguistic, the word ‘progressive’ was used in a positive way, as were similar words such as ‘modernise’. Politically correct terminology was accepted so that the word ‘they’ now seems to be used as both a plural and a singular term in the same way that the word ‘you’ is. Language is important as it sets the parameters of debate, what may or may not be said, and how it ought to be phrased.

However, it was not only linguistic niceties that were accepted by the Conservatives. The state and politicians also became hostile to abundance. Business, in principle, has always favoured abundance as it leads to profits. But this became seen as selfish and a poor use of resources from the early 1990s onwards.

Governments aimed to restrict the use of energy and to ration infrastructure because it helped their equalising agenda. This made everybody equally poor, and it was in fact a deeply socialist project dressed up as environmentalism. This has led to rationing and an expectation of limited usage as a virtue, as if we were limited by wartime restrictions.

This summer has shown it most clearly in two areas, both of which have led to discomfort for millions of people. The first is water. Not only hosepipe bans, but bossy instructions to have a shower rather than a bath. This is nonsense and entirely a matter of governmental choice. There is plenty of water in this country and no need to use it carefully. The marginal cost of a gallon of water is negligible. It is all about infrastructure.

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Every day stories abound that indicate decay and failure. Those in power, however often they are reshuffled, seem unable to answer the questions, or find that they do not have the authority that they thought they did to change things. Andy Burnham is the latest to discover that he pulls the levers of power, says ‘go’, and instead of his servant going, his servant says, ‘I cannot’.

In the last week, the failures include the inability to ensure that PC Andrew Harper’s killers remain in prison to serve their sentences, even though the Prime Minister wants this to happen. Cambridge University has been humiliated by the award of a professorship to Jason Arday and the subsequent attempt to accuse his critics of racism. Electricity companies have told people not to use electricity during a solar eclipse, and small boat arrivals have become large boat arrivals.

All of this indicates a broken Britain. Yet there are clear underlying causes that have led to all of this happening. It is not that Britain is ungovernable, or that the particular problems are not solvable. It is, in its way, rather worse. We have chosen not to be governed.

Every one of the failures listed above comes from a legislative cause, from legislation that is designed to be ‘entrenched’, a concept that has traditionally been alien to the British Constitution. The three main culprits are the Human Rights Act 1999, the Climate Change Act 2007 and the Equality Act of 2010. Each one of these has overarching powers used to ensure that future government action is in accordance with them, so limiting discretion and making the levers of power fail, because the connecting wires have been cut.

Until the European Court ruled against it and the system was changed following its orders, the final decision to release prisoners was, in certain circumstances, made by the Home Secretary. This was a political as well as a judicial decision, to retain confidence in the criminal justice system. It applied especially to murder cases and had a compelling logic.

When the death penalty still existed, the ability to exercise the prerogative of mercy lay with the Crown, which for routine purposes meant the Home Secretary. Thus, when death was replaced with a whole life term, it logically followed that the ability to release should continue to lie with the same person.

The European Court of Human Rights thought otherwise. Jealously guarding the power of the judiciary, it ruled that such decisions could not properly be made by Ministers, but had to be made by a judge on sentencing, to protect the human rights of murderers. This means that the Sentencing Act 2026 could not give any Ministerial discretion over release dates. Hence the Government faced a conundrum, about which it has not been entirely honest.

While I accept that the Prime Minister does not want PC Harper’s killers released, the Labour Government he now leads essentially accepted David Gauke’s report, and its recommendations to reduce the amount of time served in prison. It has used the excuse of overcrowding to stop short sentences of under twelve months, and to switch other sentences to one third incarceration, one third place surveillance and one third release on licence.

This is a policy choice which the Government has not been willing to defend, as it is not popular and probably will not be successful. This dishonesty, or ‘spin’ to be generous, means that extending the excluded categories not only has a short-term disadvantage of keeping more prisoners in gaol, but it also undermines the unadmitted policy change.

This prevents the easy solution of all perpetrators of manslaughter from being kept in prison, because it undermines the new policy. Naturally, the government does not want to admit this. An even easier solution would have been to add Ministerial discretion to the Sentencing Act to allow individual prisoners to be kept in gaol, but the Human Rights Act prevents that from happening.

The next recent example relates to Cambridge University and Jason Arday. It is, fundamentally, a consequence of the Public Sector Equality Duty, which is required under the Equality Act 2010. Every decision a public body makes needs to bear in mind equality consideration, and it creates an implicit expectation that there will be equity, that is to say equality of outcome, in the appointments process.

This means that institutions, and Cambridge will not be alone, need to weight their processes to encourage applicants from minorities. In other words, they create an equalities bias that is, in itself, discriminatory.

Jason Arday, in that context, was manna from heaven. He ticked so many boxes at once, both on race and disability, that the fact that he was a fantasist was ignored. The consequences of this were of no concern to the bureaucracy at the University, because he made them look good. And so they encouraged his fantasy by promoting him, not just within the university, but in publicity materials as well. He was an invaluable public relations tool, regardless of the effect on students, whose interests seem to have been wholly overlooked. Until, of course, he was exposed, and the University looked completely foolish.

DEI, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, has grown up since the Equality Act and is a pernicious form of discrimination. Again, it is legislated for and has an overriding force, so that lawmakers must consider it when making future laws. It is, thus far, a successful attempt at ‘entrenched’ legislation.

Another is the 2007 Climate Change Act, and its secondary offshoots, such as the statutory instrument that made net zero by 2050 a legal target. This Act has destroyed a once highly efficient electricity system.

In 2000, industrial electricity prices were in line with those in America. Now they are four times higher. This is a consequence of concentrating on renewables which, by their very nature, are unreliable. The wind does not always blow, nor the sun shine. This is not just during the rare occasions when there are solar eclipses. In the winter there is very little sunshine and a high demand for electricity. So backup plans are essential, which are extremely expensive.

This has made British industry uncompetitive and has led to manufacturing moving offshore, which has the effect of increasing total emissions, whilst reducing those for which Britain is technically responsible, alongside, of course, reducing employment in this country.

Yet the folly of the Climate Change Act has meant that a gas-driven energy policy would be illegal, and even exploring for more oil and gas has run into problems in the courts because of this Act. Once more, it is a semi-entrenched Act, that seeks to influence policy well beyond the strict confines of energy. It affects building regulations and infrastructure projects as well as many others.

Small boats becoming big boats is a similar problem to that of prison releases. It is a consequence of the Human Rights Act that the country is prohibited from taking the steps that would be necessary to stop the boats. Everything else is a palliative, whereas swift deportation would be a real cure.

The court cases that the last Conservative government lost in this area are a reminder of the problems even with a government that really wanted to solve illegal migration, rather than our current administration, that is supported by many people who really believe in open borders.

It is this legislative straitjacket that means the levers of power do not work, but there is a solution. Parliament can try to bind its successors, but it is a matter of constitutional fact that it cannot succeed. All three of these Acts, Human Rights, Climate Change and Equality, could be repealed or annulled. This would restore control to Ministers, who would still be answerable to Parliament and to the electorate for their decisions.

In all constitutions there must be a balance between democratic and judicial decision-making. Historically, the United Kingdom depended upon Ministers to make decisions, and judges to concentrate on what the law meant. Recently, laws have reversed this, to take swathes of decision making away from Ministers to give it to judges. Hence Andy Burnham cannot keep two bad men in prison.

The pendulum has swung too far and needs to swing back. The tools to make it swing are in the Prime Minister and Parliament’s hands.

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